Akshay asked Indu Sundaresan:

How did you get the idea of building up on the Taj Mahal trilogy?

Indu Sundaresan There's a bit of a long answer for this, Akshay! I read about Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan during graduate school here in the US. I was homesick one day, went to the library and checked out books on India. One of them was on Mughal harems and Mehrunnisa.

After I graduated (with degrees in economics and operations research) I decided to write a novel. I wrote two (unpublished) novels before I turned my attention to Mehrunnisa and wrote both THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES in one sitting. (They went through countless revisions after that first draft, of course.) That was novel 1 and novel 2 of the trilogy.

I knew even then I would write the third novel, SHADOW PRINCESS, because as I researched the first two, Shah Jahan's daughters, Jahanara and Roshanara, came to life, especially their rivalry with each other and their supporting of different brothers as the next Mughal emperor.

But, I let some 7 years pass before SHADOW PRINCESS was published--in the interim I wrote THE SPLENDOR OF SILENCE and IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS. I needed that time away from the Mughal world, because I'd spent too much time in the Mughal world in writing the first two novels of the trilogy--so when I wrote the third, SHADOW PRINCESS, I came back anew to Mughal India.

As I said, long answer :-)

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